How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be

by Katy Milkman

if you want to change your behavior or someone else’s, you’re at a huge advantage if you begin with a blank slate—a fresh start—and no old habits working against you.

There’s just one problem: true blank slates are incredibly rare. Almost all of the behaviors we want to change are everyday, customary, and baked into our hectic and well-established routines.

When we’re labeled “voters” (instead of people who vote), “carrot eaters” (instead of people who eat carrots whenever they can), and “Shakespeare readers” (instead of people who read Shakespeare a lot), it influences how we act, not just how we describe ourselves.

When we surveyed a panel of Americans about how they feel on fresh start dates such as New Year’s or their birthday, we heard again and again that new beginnings offer a kind of psychological “do-over.” People feel distanced from their past failures; they feel like a different person—a person with reason to be optimistic about the future.

We’re more likely to pursue change on dates that feel like new beginnings because these moments help us overcome a common obstacle to goal initiation: the sense that we’ve failed before and will, thus, fail again.

In a paper published in 1994, two psychologists surveyed more than a hundred people who had sought to make a meaningful life change, such as switching careers, ending a personal relationship, or starting a diet. Remarkably, they found that 36 percent of successful attempts took place when people moved homes, whereas only 13 percent of unsuccessful attempts followed a move. These statistics suggest that when we’re seeking to change, the disruptions to our lives triggered by physical transitions can be just as powerful as the fresh starts spurred by new beginnings on our calendars.

resets helped underperformers up their game but harmed people who were already doing well. This was an important and cautionary lesson: Not everyone benefits from a fresh start. When you’re on a roll, any disruption can be a setback.

while fresh starts are helpful for kick-starting change, they can also be unwelcome disruptors of well-functioning routines. Anyone seeking to maintain good habits should beware.

The power of the labeled fresh start was impressive. The postcards that encouraged employees to begin saving after their next birthday or at the start of spring were 20 to 30 percent more effective than the “ordinary” mailings that allowed people to begin saving at a more arbitrary future date. By reminding people of an upcoming fresh start, we were able to make the same opportunity for behavior change more appealing. These findings show that it may be possible to boost a wide range of goal-directed behaviors if we just get the timing of our invitations right—from enrolling in online classes to purchasing energy-efficient appliances to scheduling health checkups.

Chapter Takeaways An ideal time to consider pursuing change is after a fresh start. Fresh starts increase your motivation to change because they give you either a real clean slate or the impression of one; they relegate your failures more cleanly to the past; and they boost your optimism about the future. They can also disrupt bad habits and lead you to think bigger picture about your life. Fresh starts can be calendar dates that mark new beginnings (a new year, season, month, or week), birthdays, or anniversaries. They can also be triggered by meaningful life events, such as a health scare or a move to a new town. And finally, resets—when the metrics you’re using to track your performance are set back to zero—can also offer fresh starts. Although fresh starts can jolt you into positive change, they can also interrupt you when you’re on a roll, reversing your progress, so beware. A particularly effective time to encourage other people—employees, friends, or family members—to pursue positive change is after fresh starts.

Economists call this tendency to favor instantly gratifying temptations over larger long-term rewards “present bias,” though its common name is “impulsivity,” and it’s unfortunately universal.

in one study of the way people tackle change, more than two thirds of respondents told researchers that they typically focus on the benefits they expect to accrue in the long-run without regard for their short-term pain. Only 26 percent of those surveyed said they would try to make goal pursuit enjoyable in and of itself. There’s a good explanation for this: those long-term benefits are typically the impetus for pursuing a goal or making a change. If it weren’t for the long-term benefits of exercise, studying, saving, healthy eating, and so on, many of us would never bother.

But there’s reason to worry that an eyes-on-the-prize mentality could be a mistake. Lots of research shows that we tend to be overconfident about how easy it is to be self-disciplined. This is why so many of us optimistically buy expensive gym memberships when paying per-visit fees would be cheaper, register for online classes we’ll never complete, and purchase family-size chips on discount to trim our monthly snack budget, only to consume every last crumb in a single sitting. We think “future me” will be able to make good choices, but too often “present me” succumbs to temptation. People have a remarkable ability to ignore their own failures. Even when we flounder again and again, many of us manage to maintain a rosy optimism about our ability to do better next time rather than learning from our past mistakes. We latch on to fresh starts and other reasons to stay upbeat, which may help us get out of bed in the morning but can prevent us from approaching change in the smartest possible way.

The moral of this research to me is that temptation bundling certainly works best if you can actually restrict an indulgence to whenever you’re doing a task that requires an extra boost of motivation (such as making it possible to listen to audiobooks only at the gym, and not in your car or on the bus). But merely suggesting that people try temptation bundling is enough to produce benefits that last.

something called “gamification,” or the act of making an activity that isn’t a game feel more engaging and less monotonous by adding gamelike features such as symbolic rewards, a sense of competition, and leaderboards. Gamification was much hyped by business consultants about a decade ago as a strategy that organizations could use to more effectively motivate employees, not by changing the work itself but by changing the packaging of the work, thus making goal achievement a bit more exciting (“Yes! I earned a star!”).

science suggests gamification can help many of us tackle our goals, so long as we’re choosing to use it to pursue goals we want to achieve.

Chapter Takeaways Present bias (a.k.a. impulsivity)—the tendency to favor instantly gratifying temptations over larger long-term rewards—is a pernicious obstacle to change. Mary Poppins has it right. When goal pursuit is made instantly gratifying by adding “an element of fun,” present bias can be overcome. Temptation bundling entails allowing yourself to engage in a guilty pleasure (such as binge-watching TV) only when pursuing a virtuous or valuable activity that you tend to dread (such as exercise). Temptation bundling solves two problems at once. It can help reduce overindulgence in temptations and increase time spent on activities that serve your long-term goals. Gamification is another way to make goal pursuit instantly gratifying. It involves making something that isn’t a game feel more engaging and less monotonous by adding gamelike features such as symbolic rewards, a sense of competition, and leaderboards. Gamification works when players “buy in” to the game. It can backfire if players feel the game is being imposed on them.

Chapter Takeaways Present bias often causes us to procrastinate on tasks that serve our long-term goals. An effective solution to this problem is to anticipate temptation and create constraints (“commitment devices”) that disrupt this cycle. Whenever you do something that reduces your own freedoms in the service of a greater goal, you’re using a commitment device. An example is a “locked” savings account that prevents you from accessing your money until you’ve reached your savings goal. Cash commitment devices are a versatile form of commitment device. They allow you to create a financial incentive to meet your goal by letting you put money on the line that you’ll forfeit if you don’t succeed. Public pledges are a form of “soft” commitment that increase the psychological cost of failing to meet your goals. They are surprisingly effective, though not as effective as “hard” commitments, which involve more tangible penalties or restrictions. The costs we can impose on ourselves to help with goal achievement range from soft penalties (such as announcing goals or deadlines publicly) to hard penalties (such as having to hand over cash should we fail). There are also soft restrictions (such as eating from a smaller plate) and hard restrictions (such as putting our money in a locked savings account). The softer the penalty or restriction, the less likely it is to help with change, but the more palatable it is to adopt. Making smaller, more frequent commitments is more effective th...

Reminders work far, far better when we can act on them immediately.

Often when we make plans, we don’t focus on what will trigger us to act. Instead, we focus on what we intend to do.

Forming an implementation intention is as simple as filling in the blanks in the sentence “When ___ happens, I’ll do ___.”

The power that cues have to trigger memories means that linking a plan (such as flossing) with a cue you expect to encounter (such as your nightly tooth-brushing ritual) makes it far more likely that you’ll remember the plan. The cue will retrieve the memory of what you’re supposed to do.

we’re psychologically wired to find it uncomfortable to say one thing and do another (cognitive dissonance), which is why pledges can help change our behavior.

If you have a simple goal, such as voting in the next election, ensuring that you remember to follow through is all you need to do. But for complex goals, such as learning a foreign language, planning involves not just remembering to follow through, but also breaking your goal down into smaller, more concrete components.

If someone isn’t interested in following through in the first place, forming a cue-based plan won’t change that.

Plans don’t change minds—they only help us remember to do the things we already want to do. So they’re a nice, noncoercive way you can help other people achieve their own goals.

there is one important caveat. Research has shown that you can overdo it on cue-based planning. Having too many plans can overwhelm us.

it’s best to be choosy about which goals you’ll focus on at a given time and plan carefully to achieve just one or two.

When you have a goal that you’re afraid you might flake out on, you can create cue-based plans on your own now that you know the formula. Just remember to consider the how, when, and where: How will you do it? When will you do it? Where will you do it? Be strategic about the cues you select—if you can, choose cues that are out of the ordinary.

And if you can arrange to schedule a reminder that will appear at the very moment when you should act, do so posthaste. Finally, if your cue-based plans start to get complicated, consider developing a checklist.

Chapter Takeaways Sometimes we flake out and fail to follow through on our intentions. Flake out has many causes, including laziness, distraction, and forgetting. Forgetting may be the easiest of these obstacles to overcome. Timely reminders, which prompt you to do something right before you’re meant to do it, can effectively combat forgetting. Reminders that aren’t as timely have far smaller benefits. Forming cue-based plans is another way to combat forgetting. These plans link a plan of action with a cue and take the form “When ___ happens, I’ll do ___.” Cues can be anything that triggers your memory, from a specific time or location to an object you expect to encounter. An example of a cue-based plan is, “Whenever I get a raise, I’ll increase my monthly retirement savings contribution.” The more distinctive the cue, the more likely it is to trigger recall. Prompting people to form cue-based plans is particularly useful when they are unlikely to have already formed plans and when forgetting is a make-or-break affair (as is the case with voting on Election Day). Planning also has other benefits: It helps you break your goals into bite-size chunks, relieves you of the need to think about what you’ll do in the moment, and acts like a pledge to yourself, thereby increasing your commitment to your goal. If you form too many cue-based plans at once, you may be discouraged and your commitment may dwindle. So be choosy about which goals you’ll plan for at any given time. When pl...

Monotonous as it may sound, research in humans and other animals has proved that habits come from repeated drilling.

More often than not, the repetition that builds habits (such as nail-biting, smartphone checking, or coffee making) is accidental or mindless.

If you want to develop good habits, or to replace bad habits with better ones, you’ll be well-served to deliberately and repeatedly drill them, like a firefighter training to do the right thing in a high-pressure environment.

we can intentionally train ourselves to have good habits, and we can help others train, too. The recipe is simple: the more we repeat an action in response to consistent cues and receive some reward (be it praise, relief, pleasure, or even cold hard cash), the more automatic our reactions become.

Unfortunately, adopting new habits isn’t quite as simple as it sounds. Rewarding yourself for desirable behaviors and hitting repeat until your willpower is no longer needed to actively make the right decision is a strategy that sometimes works well. But I learned the hard way that this system operates seamlessly only in a world that’s very predictable, which, unfortunately, is not the world most of us live in.

Yes, forming stable routines is key to habit formation. But if we want to form the “stickiest” possible habits, we also need to learn how to roll with the punches, so we can be flexible when life throws us a curve ball. Too much rigidity is the enemy of a good habit.

By cultivating flexibility in your routine, your autopilot will become more robust:

we can harness our inherent laziness to make positive changes to our behavior. But it’s now clear to me that to put good behavior on autopilot, we can’t cultivate it in only one, specific way. The most versatile and robust habits are formed when we train ourselves to make the best decision, no matter the circumstances.

tracking a behavior helps you avoid forgetting to do it until it becomes second nature. It’s also a nice way to ensure you celebrate your successes and hold yourself accountable for failure. When your successes and failures are right there in your face, it’s difficult not to feel proud when you’ve done what you set out to do, and a little ashamed when you haven’t.

The ideal solution to any problem stemming from our inherent laziness is a single-dose solution—a default. If you can “set it and forget it,” whatever change you’re trying to create will be quite easy to make.*

Engineering habits means relying on repetition or “drilling” to develop a consistent response to familiar cues, while rewarding ourselves for each success.

Linking a new behavior that you’d like to turn into a habit with other habits that already exist in your life makes it easier to follow through during the critical early phase of habit development. It also helps if we track our performance and reward ourselves for success, strive to maintain streaks, and build flexibility into our routines so that whatever roadblocks we encounter don’t impede our progress.

Chapter Takeaways Laziness, or the tendency to follow the path of least resistance, can stand in the way of change. A default is the outcome you’ll get if you don’t actively choose another option (such as the standard factory settings that come with a new computer). If you select defaults wisely (say, setting your browser’s homepage to your work email instead of Facebook), you can turn laziness into an asset that facilitates change (say, wasting less time on social media). Habits are like default settings for our behavior. They put good behavior on autopilot. The more you repeat an action in familiar circumstances and receive some reward (be it praise, relief, pleasure, or cold hard cash), the more habitual and automatic your reactions become in those situations. Too much rigidity is the enemy of a good habit. By allowing for flexibility in your routines, your autopilot can become flexible, too. You will find you respond consistently even under unideal circumstances. Overall, you’ll build “stickier,” more lasting habits. Tracking your behavior can facilitate habit building. It helps you avoid forgetting to follow through and ensures that you celebrate your successes and hold yourself accountable for failures. Aim for streaks. Anything more than a short lapse in a behavior you hope to make habitual (say, multiple missed visits to the gym, as opposed to just one) can keep a new habit from forming or disrupt an existing one. Piggybacking new habits on old ones can help with h...

“The worst thing you can do is sit on bad news.”

Self-efficacy is a person’s confidence in their ability to control their own behavior, motivation, and social circumstances.

goal strivers are sometimes plagued by insecurity. In fact, a lack of self-efficacy can prevent us from setting goals in the first place.

Research confirms the obvious: when we don’t believe we have the capacity to change, we don’t make as much progress changing.

Too often, we assume that the obstacle to change in others is ignorance, and so we offer advice to mend that gap. But what if the problem isn’t ignorance but confidence—and our unsolicited wisdom isn’t making things better but worse?

in giving advice, we might be inadvertently conveying to people that we don’t think they can succeed on their own—implying that we view them as so hopeless that two minutes of advice will be worth more than all they’ve learned from attempting to solve their own problems.